Building the Digital Identity Village

Wednesday 6 June 2018 | 08:44 AM
CET

Arne Vidar Haug, the co-founder of Signicat, tell us what it takes to building trusted business relationships through digital identity

Life in a village is a dream for many people with a strong desire of being in a community where they belong. In a village everyone is up in everybody else’s business, sharing information via the village gossip.

In the digital world, things are quite different. In the online space, nobody really knows who you are or even that you are who you say you are; they find it hard to identify you, as there is too much information available about, and besides that, they have rarely met you.

No wonder that fraud is such a problem as people exploit their anonymity and organisations have to protect themselves by creating strategic approaches based on distrust. At the same time, no wonder that in a world of distrust and bureaucracy, their customers do not feel a sense of belonging or loyalty, but they more likely feel frustration in trying to prove their identity.

Signicat has recognised the future need for establishing a digital identity over 10 years ago when we built our platform to manage the process of proving identity digitally, safely and smoothly to reduce friction in signing up or onboarding new customers. However, we have also taken into consideration the significant challenge of providing a complete solution to digital onboarding by ourselves, so we have built the platform to work with APIs to enable it to integrate with client applications quickly and non-intrusively, plus, of course, software partners that add value to the process of identifying and onboarding clients.

We work with partners to create a Digital Identity Partner Ecosystem; or another way of looking at it: we create a digital identity village where:

- you are known through the identity schemes we link to;
- you can be recognised through ID document scanning and biometrics;
- your information can be shared by linking to schemes, PEP/Sanctions list providers and identity data providers:
- you can be visible digitally through video inboarding; and
- you can build trust with your bank, other financial institutions and relying parties.

Signicat demonstrated this digital identity village at Money2020 with some of our banking, scheme and digital identity software partners:

- iDIN
- Mitek
- IDnow
- Rabobank eBusiness

We believe that only by working in partnership can we support our clients in building trusted business relationships through digital identity.

Signicat is looking forward to welcoming new clients to the 350 organisations working with our platform to onboard 150 million customers across 9 countries each year. We also welcome new members to our digital identity partner ecosystem from the identity scheme, technology, and identity data provider markets.

About Arne Vidar Haug

Arne Vidar Haug is the co-founder of Signicat, the first and largest Identity Assurance Provider in the world. Signicat helps organisations and individuals can establish mutual trust with a single click. Arne co-founded Signicat to help streamline business processes by substituting physical ID-check and manual document signing with electronic identification and electronic signatures. He works with over 150 financial services organisations across Europe to provide these services, and contributes to BankID, NemID, iDIN, MyBank, GSMA Mobile Connect and other mobile schemes.

About Signicat

Signicat is based in Trondheim, Norway, and was founded in 2007; the company operates the largest Digital Identity Hub in the world, offering a leading digital identity platform and trusted to reduce the burden of compliance in highly regulated markets. With Signicat, service providers can build and leverage existing customer credentials to connect users, devices and even ‘things’ across channels, services and markets transforming identity into an asset rather than a burden. By ditching manual, paper-based processes and replacing them with digital identity assurance, customer on-boarding is accelerated and access to services is made simple and secure. Signicat’s Digital Identity Platform is a comprehensive solution to that offers compliance and a route to better customer engagement.